studiobeerhorst is making connections

"Difficulty is actually the atmosphere surrounding a miracle, or a miracle in its initial stage. Yet if it is to be a great miracle, the surrounding condition will be not simply a difficulty but an utter impossibility. And it is the clinging hand of His child that makes a desperate situation a delight to God." Streams in the Desert October 14th

I have been ruminating on these words for the past few days and finding them to be completely counterintuitive because when the situations in my life look like they are breaking down around me, my natural impulse is to freak out. When things look bad my spirit fills with dread. I feel myself losing control as I slide towards the edge of the cliff.

The words above remind me to see life's troubles as opportunities for transformation and renewal.

I think a large piece of this whole process has to do with being redirected. We make our way through life repeating our daily routines, when suddenly something unexpected happens that changes everything. This change in trajectory may happen with the loss of a job or in the death of a loved one. Perhaps it comes to us in the loss of a particular freedom and measure of independence. When I was ten years old my mother suddenly died in her sleep. It was completely unexpected and it changed my life forever. Two years later I would be living in a brand new house in a different neighborhood, riding in a brand new car sitting with three new siblings with a new mother sitting beside my Dad. It was a drastic redirection of my life that was both terrible and wonderful -- mysteriously woven together.

This whole notion of life difficulties setting the stage for miracles to happen is about us coming to the end of ourselves. When we find ourselves in situations were we are suddenly powerless, that is the place were God's power will manifest. These are the conditions for the supernatural to break through. This is where things get really interesting. Think of the story of David and Goliath. David, a boy with only a few stones and a sling coming into combat with an armored professional soldier who was also a giant. Seen from the perspective of common sense David's complete failure was eminent yet that's not what happened that day. Little David walked off with Goliath's sword and massive head. David stepped into the situation without fear, knowing God was with him. That's the way I choose to live my life... which is often pockmarked with trouble and impossibilities -that are also windows of opportunity, miracles waiting to happen.

I have fallen into a deep depression. If you were to ask me when it began I wouldn't be able to say a particular time. It is as if I have slowly fallen into an enchantment, an evil spell. It has become almost impossible to make new art work. I can still draw and paint what I observe but the development of the kind of painting that I am known for feels completely out of my reach. Everything feels hard. I tell people it feels like riding a bike with two flat tires and the brakes stuck on. This is in my mind, so there is no real way to get away from it. I have experimented with meditation which does seem to bring relief during those 20 minutes of quiet thoughtlessness. The terror inside of this paralyses is that - if I am not creating new work, how long until we run out of money and the whole Beerhorst family circus goes bust? I think about this a lot. Today the light in the refrigerator stopped working which felt like a precursor to much more serious breakdowns looming in our future.

My friends tell me this will not last forever. They tell me eventually I will feel better and I will be back to my old self again. I really hope this is true though it is really hard to see that from down where I have fallen. I like being with other people for the relief it brings during that time I am with them. It is nice to have a listening ear though I am afraid that I am beginning to sound like a broken record. Honestly there is very little anyone can do to help me right now because the brokenness is inside of me and no one can reach inside and change the worn out part.

I have a bipolar disorder which means I go way up and then I come down. You can not give an antidepressant to a bipolar person or it could likely send them into a manic episode. I have begun a mood stabilizer medication that is supposed to even out my moods and keep me running smoothly like a more normal person. The catch is that it takes about a month to kick in and I am only one and a half weeks in. Two and a half more weeks sounds like two and a half years to me right now. As a bipolar person I have been mostly up through out my life. This is the first time I have really been deeply down so this is new to me. As difficult as this is I choose to navigate this darkness with grace and what ever wisdom God will allow.

When I was ten years old my mother passed away quietly in her sleep. Death came to my mother in her 40th year and it hit our family completely unprepared. I am the youngest of the four children and I didn't actually know what happened until I came home from school that day. I will never forget climbing up onto my dad's lap and weeping. My life changed forever in that moment. The next day when I walked to school it seemed so strange that the whole world was just going forward like it always did. Something had come to a stop in my life like the slow motion film clip of the crash test dummies going through the windshield. My mother had gone away for ever, stopped existing but the rest of the world carried on.

As with all terrible things there was a gift hidden within the event of my mothers death. I learned from an early age that we can survive horrible things. Life becomes difficult and then it gets better. It is as if life has a sort of wave pattern like the sea alive with its waves and of course so is sound. Eventually my wound and leave me with a glorious scar. In two years my father would find a new life partner (still with her 44 years later) and my lost mother was replaced- sort of.

When I think back to this early dance with death I think that it may have been the moment that I became an artist. That day I walked to school and noticed how strange I felt and how separate I was from the rest of the world, maybe I was stepping into my artist destiny. I believe artists endure a certain separateness. This separateness the artists feel is not one that makes them in any way better or worse. They are still obviously part of the human family. It is the separateness that the shaman feels in his village or perhaps the prophetess that speaks to the people on behalf of God. There is this certain out side looking in that I have always felt. Ok, maybe it's is too grandiose to think that artists might be speaking for God (tho I think Joan of Ark certainly was and what artist doesn't identify with Saint Joan?). Another way to think about this is just that artist have a hard time fitting into the regular world and so they end up making their own world. They make it the way they want it to be or feel that it should be. In my world death is not the end but a new beginning. Death is a stepping over into another kind of life. Death is when our time to take or test is over and it is time to hand in what we have completed. Death is the stopping point for when we rise up into our next life.

In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered for healing. And during the writing of the story, or the painting, or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith. Madeleine L'Engle, Walking On Water

And just as a reminder, Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1

I find my self needing to sit in a chair and stare off into space from time to time. I may close my eyes but I do not go to sleep. I simply sit and be. If I want to clear my head of thoughts I will think about my breath coming and going and when I do this I find my self settle down into a space that feels very large and forgiving. It is when I am in this mode that some of my best ideas come to me.

On the other hand I also receive wonderful ideas while I am in the midst of working, the work could be washing dishes of it could be looking for a particular drawing in my flat file. I don't have a formula and I'm not looking for one but I just know that I need both, activity and contemplative rest.

People are given names at birth. Cities have names as do countries. Ever since we began having our own children and it became our responsibility to give them names things changed for me. It was as if suddenly names and their inner meanings were possible clues to who a person or a city was to be. I am always surprised when I ask someone upon meeting for the first time and I ask them what there name means and they are at a complete loss to tell me. It makes me wonder if they know who they really are and what they have been called to do with their one precious life.

The origins of Florence go back to the period of the Etruscans when Fiesole, and important city of Etruria built on to o of a hill, dominated the valley. A group of its inhabitants went down the banks of the river to give life to a village, even if a modest one, but destined to develop because of a favorable position. This position was , however, an easy prey for enemies and invaders. As a matter of fact the Romans themselves put their tents there and founded a colony with the name of Florence, which means, “destined to flourish”.

This is a wood cut built out of an old book page and a piece of a letter. From time to time we a reminded that our days on earth our numbered. Thankfully we do not know the number unless we are on death row. My mother died very suddenly when I was only 10 years. Death was all of a sudden very real. The good side of all this morbid thought is the way it brings you to the notion of an after life, the big "then what?" Could it be that our life here is a wonderful and painful preparation for an eternal after life? And if it is a preparation, then how is it going? I make drawings in the process of making paintings. The drawings are sometimes lovely but they don't hold a candle to the final painting.

I think it is time for another painting of Shepherd. This one here was done four, may e five years ago. Shepherd is my my only son among five girls. He is now thirteen years old and shifting from a boy into a man. Sometimes I wonder if making paintings of my children is what I should be doing and I remind my self of Morandi and his bottles. At some point an artist must decide what he is about and just faithfully work there. The great French painter Degas said, "All I ask is for my own little corner where I can dig assiduously." having children and living lives with them that is tightlynwoven pulls you into a powerful mystery. They are very like you and yet so very different. You are in in part responsible for their very existence. (what if I never asked Brenda for that dance back in the spring of 1985?) They are mortal and yet in God's new heaven and new earth they will live forever. The paintings all circle around these puzzeling mysteries and they could easily keep me pondering and painting for the rest of my life.

This is a new illustration done for the magazine Christianity Today. I don't know if I ever spent this much time creating a block before. I was inspired by the artists Edward Hicks who worked with this theme many times during his life time. Hicks was a 19th century Quaker minister and folk artist. The idea that where God is there will be peace is why Jesus was called the Prince of Peace. I am always interested in events that pull unusual clusters of people that would otherwise not want to be together. I find that it is at events like this that God seems to be particularly present and I am not talking church buildings here. Creative happenings whether a music event or art happening, places where you see multiple generations comingled along with rich and poor people and different ethnic backgrounds.....this is when it gets interestingly weird. The Peaceable Kingdom, bring it on!

This is the cover of my new CD witch is in production right now and is scheduled to be shipped June 6th. For $5 you can download the whole CD little piece of the pie at http://thewealthyorphans.bandcamp.com/ This project has been in the works for four years and was begun long before the Wealthy Orphans came together so it does not bear the WO name but rather Rick Beerhorst. It contains eleven tracks plus one hidden track. for $15 I will ship you the physical CD to you any where in the US. (Out side of the US add an extra $2 for shipping.) The package was designed by the brilliant Rick Devon at Greymatter Group. Mr Devon also functioned as the producer and sound engineer on the project. I really love this CD and I think you will like it to the more you listen to it. Give it a try.

This is a funny little water color I did this week anticipating our band The Wealthy Orphans show at a large local micro brewery

(Large/Micro, that sounds odd.) The show went really well. The process of making art tends to be a very solitary and private affair. The act of performing music on a stage with a band in a large room full of people eating and drinking talking and dancing is very different. I think that the two balance each other out some how. In fact it is as if the one makes the other more potent. I am always looking for ways to blend music together with visual art and this little drawing is a move in that direction. You can download our music here http://thewealthyorphans.bandcamp.com/

This is a painting by the artist Amy Hill who shows with Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago. This is piece is from a series she has done called bohemians. I really love the way her paintings deeply rooted in the past and at the same time clearly connect with our times right now. I love the attention to detail in her painting As well as how much variation she has from painting to painting as she develops her themes. I would love to add one of her paintings to my collection eventually. See more of her work here

I get into the studio by about 9:30 every day. I do not always feel like getting started but I do anyway. Chuck Close has said that inspiration is for amateurs. What he means as the pros just go to work wether they feel like shit or not. I have taken this to heart because it works for me. Kurt Vonnegut said that when he goes to work at his writing he feels like a armless, legless man with a fat crayon in his mouth. The paintings I do inch along at a snails pace. Some times the improvements are imperceptible to anyone but me. I have been listening to "Glitter and Doom" by Tom Waites this week. Music helps me to make art.

This is the limited edition wood cut print we gave away at our Beehorst Family Spring Art Show last week end. My family sometimes watches me get carried away with some of the books I read. What happens to us when we read? How do books effect us differently than say watching a movie made from a book? I have a theory that a book may be more powerful than a movie for the way it releases the story more slowly like medicine that comes in regular doses rather than one big hit all at once. Perhaps the power of reading has also to do with the way we create the images in our imagination while we read that makes it even more personal. The print is printing the image onto paper. When we read a book we are like the paper that is receiving the image. We are left with an impression on our lives, forever changed.

We are in the process of a short film being made by Etsy.com this week end that will end up posted to their website. Our new friend Tara Young has been patiently shooting for the past two days. She has interviewed all the children and Brenda and I. She has shot B roll and interacted with our guests. The children have done a pretty good job of taking the whole thing in stride. Fortunately they have all grown up be the subject of many a drawing, painting of photograph so they are good at acting natural in situations that are not normal like having a big heavy camera on a large tripod watching you while you play video games, draw with crayons, or feed the chickens. Tara is a story teller and she tells her stories through video. She is here for our story and we are doing the best we can to accommodate her because we feel like this is a rare opportunity to share a Beerhorst Family Art Show with the world outside of Grand Rapids Michigan. We would hope this may unlock ideas other families may have to work together. Perhaps other families would like to find reasons to open their homes to their neighborhoods doing commerce and making new friends at the same time.

The back ground of this particular painting was done from 100 year old German post cards that were found in a dumpster here in our neighborhood. (The penmanship of the cards all in German and beautiful fountain pen script.) The blue coat was vintage an kind of dirty, and what is with the sea shells that keep showing up in these narrative portrait paintings? Good question! I think the shells refer to the long slow process of anything that is created. The slow accumulation of layer on layer, the way an oil painting is made, the way a shell is made, the way a life is made. Shells are also homes as well as protection. These portraits are of children well rooted to a place. They are at home. They are protected and flourishing even with the frustrations and hard ships they live with and endure. What do you think the spool of thread may represent?

We are counting down the days to the next Beerhorst Family Art Show happening the first week end of May. Paintings have been photographed and reconsidered. Drawings and prints have been organized and priced.

The shrinky dinks have been shrunk, pot holders woven, rugs crocheted, and now the walls are being hung and the house cleaned. This opportunity means a lot to us for the chance to see what happens when people come in contact with the things that we have made. Not only is it the art and crafts themselves but it is the event itself which becomes the context where all of this will happen. The event is something we crete with you as you participate. We so want for you to come and help us remember why we do this. We need your presence to make the experience potent and meaningful. Without you it is less and you know who you are.